Recently, there has been a shift towards wireless technologies resulting in a surge of wireless products. Wireless versions exist for nearly all products. An area of wireless technology that has seen significant growth over the past decade is wireless networking, and more specifically wireless local area networks (“WLAN”). Wireless networks are becoming more prevalent, and are available nearly everywhere. Cities are deploying city-wide wireless networks, wireless connectivity is available in businesses, homes, libraries, airports, and even coffee shops. The benefits of wireless networks are undeniable. They are extremely convenient, providing increased mobility and efficiency. Furthermore, wireless networks are easy to expand, and easy to deploy. However, despite all the benefits of wireless networks, issues of security, range, arid speed exist with WLANs.
The IEEE 802.11 protocol is the governing standard for WLANs. As wireless networking technology has developed, the IEEE 802.11 standard has undergone multiple amendments. Each amendment is aimed to address specific shortcomings of wireless networks. These amendments are designated by a letter following “802.11,” and have introduced various improvements on the original 802.11 standard. The 802.11b and 802.11g standards are two modulation amendments that are widely used for implementing home wireless networks. The 802.11i standard is an amendment to the 802.11 standard implementing various security mechanisms for wireless networks. The 802.11i standard introduced the WiFi Protected Access2 (“WPA2”) protocol, which supplemented the wired equivalent privacy (“WEP”) and WiFi Protected Access (“WPA”) protocols. WPA2 makes use of the Extensible Authentication Protocol (“EAP”) in providing a pairwise master key (“PMK”) in establishing a secure link.
Another amendment currently under development to the IEEE 802.11 standard is the 802.11s standard. The 802.11s standard was chartered to improve throughput of data transmission over a wireless network through the addition of mesh capabilities. Mesh capabilities allow data to be transmitted on paths consisting of multiple wireless hops. A primary focus during the development of the 802.11s standard with mesh capabilities was to improve performance for streaming video. However, streaming video limits the time allotted for links to be established, making the establishment of a secure link difficult with existing authentication protocols. Particularly difficult is the negotiation of a PMK for establishing the authenticated peer link during the allotted time.